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In the early 2000s a sharp downturn in the market for memory chips pushed Hynix Semiconductor, as it was known at the time, to the brink of collapse. Sales fell by half, and the South Korean company's market capitalisation sank to just above $500m. A decade of brutal restructuring ensued, during which it narrowly survived an effort by Micron, an American competitor, to buy it for parts. In 2012 the floundering chipmaker was acquired by SK Group, a local conglomerate.
The AI boom has fuelled a vertiginous rise in SK Hynix's market capitalisation, which in May passed $1trn. On July 10th the company listed its shares on America's Nasdaq exchange, raising $26.5bn in the process, a record for a foreign company. Although its share price slumped on the following trading day, with investors wary of the increasingly lofty valuations of chipmakers, it is still up by around 1,000% since the start of 2025. The money raised in the listing, along with the $50bn of cash its operations generated in the 12 months to March, will fund an ambitious expansion (see chart). “We're going to double our whole capacity in the next five years,” Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, pledged last month. Appetite for its chips is voracious: sales in its most recent quarter were triple the level a year earlier.
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Part of the explanation lies in its nimbleness. Stuck in the shadow of Samsung, which controlled around 40% of the memory market (against Hynix's roughly 25%) in the early 2010s, the runner-up started looking for ways to leapfrog the competition. Identifying novel ways to circumvent the physical limits of increasingly tiny chips became a focus, recalls Park Sung-wook, its chief executive in 2013-18. Opportunity struck in 2008 when AMD, an American company that itself played second fiddle to Intel, asked SK Hynix to create a new form of stacked memory chip for a graphics processor. The pair had previously worked together on an earlier graphics-memory chip that had proved a great success. Although the early trial of HBM, launched in 2013, proved too pricey for customers, it demonstrated that stacking memory chips vertically could achieve significantly faster speeds.
Corporate culture has also played an important part. Samsung is known to reward internal competition through a cut-throat meritocracy. SK Hynix, on the other hand, embraces collaboration. Hyun Sun-yeop, its former human-resources chief, argues that company-wide practices such as frequent one-on-ones let employees speak out and share information, in contrast with Samsung's more hierarchical and siloed environment.
